Why we made this change

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But no more! Today I’m putting a stake in the ground: “Web 2.0” will die on October 1, 2012. To arrive at this date, I simply fit a straight line to the more or less linear decline in search volume for the trend since its outlier peak in 2007. And by “fit” I mean “drew in Photoshop.”

You can see below that extending the trend out to infinity sees it cross the x-axis almost exactly three-quarters of the way through 2012. That’s the point at which the term “Web 2.0” will have become so tired and worn out that even the PR professionals who refuse to drop it will finally get a clue.

What this says about the over-use of “2.0” as a suffix for every other noun / trend you can think of is unknown. Hopefully a time when no one uses the antecedent of this lazy marketing shorthand is also a time when it doesn’t make sense to say, for example, “Food 2.0.”

The alternative – that “2.0” becomes a permanent part of speech, like “all cooped up” or “behind the 8-ball,” is just too terrifying to contemplate.

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Christopher Mims was a contributing editor at MIT Technology Review between 2011 and 2012. Before that, he blogged about the converging crises of the 21st century for Grist. He… More has also reported for Wired and Scientific American, and worked on various projects for the BBC, The Atlantic and Smithsonian.

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